


A Windowsill on Denmark Street

by foreverhalffull



Category: Cormoran Strike Series - Robert Galbraith, Strike (TV 2017)
Genre: And Charlotte is the sea, Cormoran is Ulysses, Gen, Someone please validate Robin, Subtle Cunliffe Gaslighting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-03
Updated: 2020-09-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:42:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26272060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foreverhalffull/pseuds/foreverhalffull
Summary: Not every aspect of the job is pleasant.
Comments: 9
Kudos: 17





	A Windowsill on Denmark Street

Despite the teasing Matt had enjoyed at her expense the night before, Robin was excited to return to the detective’s office for her second day. Her first assignment could be to suss out whether he truly was living in the office, she mused.

There were no suitcases or boxes, and the closet in the outer office had no hangers, so if he was sleeping rough, he had incredibly meagre possessions. But she’d noted a camp bed and pillow when retrieving the hoover to clean up the hundreds of shreds of paper the beautiful, glacial woman (Charlotte, she’d learned) had left behind like a primary school student cutting a snowflake from A4 paper.

Still, that didn’t mean he slept on it often. It could be for overnight surveillance trips, or staking out an alley, or maybe he sometimes had to pretend to sleep rough to befriend men on the streets who’d witnessed criminal aspects of his cases. But then he wouldn’t exactly fit in as authentic, bringing an entire camp bed and pillow down to the kerb, rather than flattened boxes and a sleeping bag. No, Robin was probably letting her imagination get away from herself. Roger Rabbit, indeed.

The fact of the matter was that her current role was somewhere between secretary and cleaner. But she’d do the job, and do it well, and maybe, just maybe… She hadn’t admitted to anyone, not her lifelong love Matthew or her only older brother, Stephen, the two people with whom she was closest, but she did hope that she could prove herself useful enough to become a more permanent secretary. She was aware that without her degree and having left Yorkshire for only four short weeks in as many long years, she wasn’t worthy of any position other than a secretarial one. Fortunately, Matthew was wise enough on the ways of the working world, having been at his accounting firm for nearly a year now, to lead her in a frank discussion about her professional potential. She didn’t know what she would do without him.

So she set about preparing the office for the day. As she’d been quite industrious in her cleaning the day before, there wasn’t an incredible amount to be done, but there was a faint stale odour the lemon furniture polish couldn’t mask. She made a mental note to pop down to the corner store for a scented candle at lunchtime. The inner office was quiet but lit, its door partially open, and Robin wondered whether his absence was an indication that he wasn’t sleeping there. 

Her investigative heart singing within her, a newly re-familiar feeling, she decided to take the opportunity provided by his absence in the inner office to clean it up a bit.

She tiptoed into the faintly lit office, feeling a misplaced reverence for the mysterious place where her life’s dream took place. Her attention was first drawn to the windowsill beside the desk, where a bit of food waste had collected over the course of the previous evening. Cormoran’s dinner?

Cormoran groaned internally at the light, even tread his brain interpreted as a tinkling triangle, or potentially the highest notes of a glockenspiel. He was lying face down on the camp bed, a position which was incredibly difficult for him to get into or out of with one leg, and he wasn’t exactly sure how he’d managed it the night before. Twenty-seven percent of him was physically there, incredibly hungover. 

The remaining seventy-three had escaped to the image he'd called home for a decade and a half, in that corner of his heart where others may have a deeply-held "happy place." He was mentally on the coast of James Joyce’s Ireland, staring into Algy’s grey sweet mother: the turbulent sea. It was as cold in the novel as the younger of the two women with which he’d always associated it, from the first time he’d read _Ulysses_ at Oxford. He wondered how far the metaphor extended now. Only the triumph of time would tell, he supposed, attempting to subdue the train of thought.

The steps were approaching his window now, and the owner of the tiptoe-ing feet would soon see him over the top of his desk.

In a start, he remembered the surprisingly adequate temp he’d failed to send home yesterday, and in the same brainwave the evening which had led to his eventual pissing in a cup o’ noodles and falling face down to the uncomfortable bed. In a rush to prevent her discovering it, he attempted to roll over and sit up at once, buggering his elbow on the metal frame of the camp bed in the process.

Robin placed the crisps packet and plastic cutlery in the bin bag she’d brought from the outer office and reached out to do the same for the cup o’ noodles, which she then realized wasn’t empty. _Holy fucking Christ._ Robin wanted to believe the golden, salty liquid in the cup o’ noodles was created of a very concentrated seasoning packet. But seeing no floating noodles on the surface, and admitting that the musty odour which had been subtle in the outer office was now overpowering, she was less than optimistic.

When she’d conceded to Matt that there were less-than-pleasant aspects of working at a two-person private detective agency, touching her boss’s piss had _not_ been on the list. 

“Stop!” 

Robin had thought she was alone in the office, and jumped at the raspy morning voice she couldn’t help but notice, despite her momentary terror, was attractive. Fortunately, she had not knocked over the cup-of-not-noodles when she startled. Her hand was too close to just pull back now, she had to go through. She gulped down her disgust.

“Would you go check the emails to see whether my three o’clock is still coming? He scheduled a couple weeks back.”

He had no three o’clock, but hopefully the search through the past two months’ emails would occupy the over-eager and ever-competent secretary for long enough for him to put on his leg and pour out his piss.

“And don’t touch that!”

Relieved, Robin retracted her hand. "You should drink more water." 

As she made her way back to the outer office, where she washed her hands at the kitchenette’s sink, she realized with small pride that that was her first case closed. He was definitely living in the office. 

Cormoran sighed. He’d liked having the reddish-haired younger woman around, but he’d never be able to keep her past the week now. There was no way he’d be able to live down that mortification. _Drink more water, my ass._

**Author's Note:**

> Today at precisely 11:42 am I had an urgent need to know what was going through Robin's mind when she saw the cup of noodles, so here we are!! I didn't take the time to re-watch Cuckoo's Calling to refresh on what exact order of things happened, or on what day of her working there the pee cup happened, because I really expected this to just be 300 awkward/funny words which is not exactly what I ended up with. (Could I ever write something that doesn't include a dramatic inner monologue? I don't think so...)
> 
> Also I know this is a kind of funky mashup of book version and TV adaptation, because this scene only happens in TV, but in TV he literally has a pillow and blanket on the sofa right away, but I didn't like that, so *poof* it doesn't exist anymore!


End file.
